Wednesday, March 9th, 2016...10:53 pm

The Blue Room AKA H. Newsum & Sons Ltd. Steam SawMill.

These are some pictures of my performance space. I wanted to peform my piece here as it is on the Broadgate side of the Drill Hall and that is where the H. Newsum & Sons Ltd. Steam SawMill used to exist. As you can see the space at the moment is being use as a storage cupboard, however, my plan is to transform it into a woodwork room that plays on 4 of 5 senses: Sight, Sound, Smell and Touch. There will be many elements to my piece, all of them linking into the idea of the once existing SawMill. For the sight, a projection of a steam sawmill and its process, the actual installation itself of sawdust on the floor, wooden panels and furniture filling the room and me completing my task of completly demolishing a wooden table by sawing it up. Sound will be a soundscape of 3 different accounts, one of behalf of the tree being made into wooden floor panels – giving a voice to the voiceless, one from Henry Newsum who was the owner of the SawMill and one of the employees at the SawMill. The Smell will be given from all the sawdust and wooden panels, giving the room that freshly sawn wood feeling. Lastly touch will be apparent as I cut of bits of the table I will hand them over to the audience who will be able feel it.

With all of this taken into account, I am hoping to give the audience a feel of the history of the site but more importantly the actual foundations of the site, before the Drill Hall was even thought of. I want them to leave my piece feeling in the know about something that they probably didn’t know about before. I also want them to feel involved in the actual performance, when I hand them the fragments of wood, I want them to take it away with them – they don’t have to of course – and feel that they had a sense of being a part of it.